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The Pessimal Design

2019 represented my first NaNoWriMo win, which you can read about in my blog. Believe it or not, this was originally intended to be a serioius, 100% technically accurate, and completely feasible techno thriller. To my surprise, I learned there's a reason Hollywood plays fast-and-loose with technical details in movies, so it actually became a comedic mash-up of a techno-thriller, a business process manual, and a few horror stories from my past. This is to say, it's a work of fiction ... except where it isn't.

Sadly, when I went back to edit in April of 2020, we were just entering the "Covid months," and with a key plot-element being the "bad guys" bringing in a homeless person to cough on a keyboard and infect an entire open-seating plan office with intestinal flu, it's on the "too soon" editing pile for now.

As a lowly contract programmer at one of the country's leading business software companies, Bob Chase is at the bottom of the barrel. Heck, he doesn't even really know what the company's flagship product actually does. But, when he unwittingly gets assigned to look at some old code, sinister agents awaken after years of sleep to stop him from learning what skeletons live in the corporate closet.

Now, he's finding secret messages in dashboards, co-workers are disappearing, corporate spies are trashing his apartment, janitors are warning him of lurking dangers, bizarre satanic rituals are being held in the cafeteria, and the gorgeous communications consultant on the 12th floor is suddenly acknowledging he's alive ... or so he thinks ... his friends aren't convinced he's not subconsciously making all of these things up to cope with his boring existence.

Click here to download your complimentary copy of the first three chapters

As an added bonus, I invite you to enjoy the playlist that set the mood, helped me keep focus, and constantly ran in the background during the course of writing this novel.